Wendy Lecker: Follow colleges' advice on what students need

Published 5:18 pm, Friday, May 4, 2012

"College readiness" are education buzzwords that have taken on a personal dimension for me.

I recently visited colleges with my daughters and saw what these institutions value. At each school, students and admissions officers emphasized the importance of research and writing in developing skills that students will need in any field they choose. They stressed interdisciplinary learning to open a student's world. They sought well-rounded students, engaged in their communities, with well-developed analytical abilities.

By contrast, the focus of Connecticut education "reformers" is to increase standardized testing from preschool throughout high school. Achievement is seen solely in terms of test scores and "teaching and learning" means test prep.

Governor Malloy declared that he didn't mind teaching to the test if it would raise test scores. Other Connecticut "reformers" have clearly taken that to heart. "Proficiency" on standardized tests trumps all.

Sandra Kase, second in command to Bridgeport Superintendent Paul Vallas, recently sent a memo to all administrators and teachers, claiming that there is a "lull" in teaching and learning after the administration of the state tests. To remedy this "lull," the Vallas administration has instituted standardized tests in June that "will mirror the CMT and CAPT examination."

Children in Bridgeport now have to suffer through test prep, oops, I mean "teaching and learning," from the CMTs and CAPTs through the end of the year.

Besides the sheer cruelty of making children and teachers endure mind-numbing test prep for most of the year, this kind of drilling is antithetical to teaching and harmful to learning.

In 1987, the National Research Council's book, "Education and Learning to Think," noted that the "most important single message of modern research" is that the assumption that one must acquire lower level skills before engaging in "higher order thinking" is false. In fact, the National Research Council found that the "failure to cultivate ... higher order skills may be the source of major learning difficulties even in elementary school."

These conclusions were confirmed by a three-year study published by the U.S. government in 1991, which dispelled the "myth that, for most of the children of poverty, academically challenging work in mathematics and literacy should be postponed until ... children have acquired full mastery of basic skills." The study found more value in extended writing and writing integrated with reading, for example, than in focusing on discrete skills and comprehension at the literal level.

Twenty-five years ago, we knew from the research that focusing on basic skills harms learning for all children, rich and poor. And it is doubtful that drilling for tests imparts even basic skills.

Parents, teachers and administrators love this idea. A high school principal remarked, "We can't have kids writing just a two-page paper in high school, then expect them to write twenty-page papers in college." Will Fitzhugh is a former history teacher. Given the freedom, I am sure our teachers could find myriad creative ways to develop our children's analytical skills.

Education must be about exposing our children to a wide variety of topics and materials, without a script. They also must learn collaboration by interacting with each other. Since innovation is often a new twist on something that already exists, we sow the seeds of innovative thinking by allowing a child to explore the world through the prism of her unique life experience. We cannot hope for an innovative future if we only permit our children to explore rubrics and worksheets. Well-rounded individuals will not emerge from one-dimensional schools.

If the aim is college readiness, it is time for "reformers" to shed their low expectations for all our children, especially our poorest children. They must stop worshipping at the altar of high-stakes standardized tests, and allow us to reclaim education that is in service to our children and their future, rather than in pursuit of meaningless targets.